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Very interesting overview. It shows that the majority of a (Q&A) site can be run on "just" 9 servers - we're not talking scaling to thousands of servers here.

Very interesting overview. It shows that the majority of a (Q&A) site can be run on "just" 9 servers - we're not talking scaling to thousands of servers here. I'd be interested to know what DBMS they're running, and it's very interesting that they've moved the tag "indices" out to their own cluster. I'd also be interested to know whether they run out of 1 datacentre and how/if they mitigate that risk.

adamnemecek 12y ago
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-and-technologies-are-used-to-build-the-stack-exchange-network http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...
- alexchamberlain 12y ago
  TL;DR Microsoft stack and 2 datacentres: NJ and Oregon.
ayrx 12y ago
Plus they have a lot of spare capacity on the hardware. Even if traffic were to double they wouldn't need new servers to keep things running smoothly.
- lclarkmichalek 12y ago
  A lot of spare capacity on the CPU != a lot of spare capacity. They are most likely much more constrained wrt RAM and disk ops
  - ayrx 12y ago
    I very much doubt that's the case for their web servers. Note how they only opted for 48GB on their web servers vs the much larger numbers on their DB servers?
codeulike 12y ago
I'd be interested to know what DBMS they're running MS SQL Server, latest version probably
- BrentOzar 12y ago
  Correct, Microsoft SQL Server 2014.
misiti3780 12y ago
also interesting is how quora, with presumably less traffic , but built on python, said in a press release associated with their last large raise (50MM I believe ) that majority of the money would be spent on EC2 bills - I'll update this thread with a link when I find it update: http://www.quora.com/What-will-Quora-do-with-the-50-million-in-funding-it-just-received http://www.quora.com/What-will-Quora-do-with-the-50-million-... "We project a large portion of this money to go to EC2 and other AWS bills. It might be replaced by whatever the most appropriate place for us to run our infrastructure is in the future but as of today it's looking like EC2."

adamnemecek 12y ago

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-and-technologies-are-used-to-build-the-stack-exchange-network http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...

alexchamberlain 12y ago
TL;DR Microsoft stack and 2 datacentres: NJ and Oregon.

ayrx 12y ago

Plus they have a lot of spare capacity on the hardware. Even if traffic were to double they wouldn't need new servers to keep things running smoothly.

lclarkmichalek 12y ago
A lot of spare capacity on the CPU != a lot of spare capacity. They are most likely much more constrained wrt RAM and disk ops
- ayrx 12y ago
  I very much doubt that's the case for their web servers. Note how they only opted for 48GB on their web servers vs the much larger numbers on their DB servers?

codeulike 12y ago

I'd be interested to know what DBMS they're running MS SQL Server, latest version probably

BrentOzar 12y ago
Correct, Microsoft SQL Server 2014.

misiti3780 12y ago

also interesting is how quora, with presumably less traffic , but built on python, said in a press release associated with their last large raise (50MM I believe ) that majority of the money would be spent on EC2 bills - I'll update this thread with a link when I find it update: http://www.quora.com/What-will-Quora-do-with-the-50-million-in-funding-it-just-received http://www.quora.com/What-will-Quora-do-with-the-50-million-... "We project a large portion of this money to go to EC2 and other AWS bills. It might be replaced by whatever the most appropriate place for us to run our infrastructure is in the future but as of today it's looking like EC2."